Darion stood on the roof of the stone building and watched Valdenmoor’s farmland burn.

The fire moved rapidly, obviously showing that this was an accelerant.

He felt something watching it. Not satisfaction in the way he normally felt satisfaction.

He decided that this was ’cold satisfaction’.

He thought about the damage done to Percvale’s farmlands.

The animals that had been alive and healthy and breeding and were now dead because of Aldric.

Because Aldric had decided that ’Oh I needed to make a point.’

The point had been made. A different one than Aldric had intended.

He took the perceptive glass from his inner pocket and zoomed to Seren in her tree. She was watching the farmland burn from her elevated position, the bow lowered, the last arrow sitting across her hand unused.

Her face was still and he could bet she felt satisfaction for what she had just done, setting Valdenmoor’s farmlands on fire.

Sure, Valdenmoor knights had destroyed the things planted on the farmlands she worked on.

But the work she had done on Percvale’s soil had not been undone, the restoration was in the earth, not in the surface. They could plant again. Things would grow better than before the destruction because the soil underneath still carried what she had put into it.

Watching this massive stretch of Valdenmoor’s agricultural land burn was vengeance for that. He came down from the roof.

Darion came down from the roof. He had been watching with his wild wolf standing beside him. He returned the perceptive glass from where he took it, climbed on the wolf and it jumped down in one big and heavy leap.

He rode the wolf back to the barracks.

What met him there was what victory looked like when it had been planned properly and executed with the right tools.

The outer wall was partly demolished where the fire had compromised the structure and sections had come down. The interior was a ruin: timber, bedding, supplies, everything that had been inside the main building reduced to ash and frame. The open ground of the compound was covered with dead.

Many dead. More than he had expected even accounting for what the fire and the compounds and the undead had done together.

The incapacitation bundles had been used in the second phase by his living knights as they advanced, deployed into the groups that had managed to organize after the initial chaos, and the results had been exactly what Vera had described.

Groups of fifty going down at once, the knights walking through them without resistance, the wolves and the Rops working through whatever remained.

The undead were still standing. Most of them, at least, a few had been destroyed in the fighting, the core structures shattered and they had been gone.

But the majority were present, waiting, the green eyes moving across the ruined compound with patience.

They looked like they were waiting for the next command.

His living knights were standing too.

He turned to the nearest one.

"How many did we lose?"

"Seven, m’lord."

Seven.

He thought about that number against what was on the ground around him. Thousands of Valdenmoor’s force dead or incapacitated, the barracks destroyed, the king in a carriage on the road to Percvale. And just seven of his people.

Magic!

Without Vera’s compounds, without the fire accelerant and without the incapacitation bundles, this was a different outcome entirely. Sixty people did not defeat two thousand through conventional means. They had not defeated them through conventional means. They had defeated them through the careful application of tools that turned the size advantage into a liability, that made formation and concentration work against Valdenmoor rather than for them.

The math was genuinely absurd, ridiculous even.

60 versus over two thousand and the sixty had won.

It was this kind of things that he read in folklores.

Then ten of his knights came around the side of the ruined building with prisoners.

Bravar was at the front. Hands tied, armor dented and smoke-blackened from the fire, a cut above his eye that had bled down his face and dried there.

Behind him, a group of men in the clothes of administrators and advisors rather than soldiers, Aldric’s council.

The incapacitation bundles had caught most of them before they could reach the exits, and his knights had bound them while they were still on the ground.

They were all alive. Several of them were already talking. Talking fast and desperate. Talks of people who understood their situation and were trying to negotiate their way out of it before anyone made a decision.

Bravar was not talking.

He looked at Darion, accepting that he had been defeated but not showing it, he didn’t beg or talk fast. He spat on the ground instead.

"You son of a codpiece," he said. The word came out with real weight behind it.

’Cod piece?’ Darion blinked.

What does that mean?

On Bravar’s face was anger. He had spent weeks watching his barracks fall apart, not knowing who did it but now, but now, had just had his suspicions confirmed about who was responsible.

"It was you. The whole time. Killing our knights in the night."

Darion looked at him.

"Yes," he said. The curl at the corner of his mouth was not something he tried to suppress. "And now I’m the cause of this too."

Bravar looked at the ruined barracks. At the dead on the ground. At the smoke rising from the farmland in the distance.

He said nothing further.

The council advisors were still talking. Several of them were on their knees now, pleading for their lives. They weren’t trying to act tough or question him, they just wanted to survive... to be alive.

Darion looked at them. Then at Bravar, who was standing straight with his hands bound behind him and his jaw set.

He turned to the wolf.

"Kill them," he said.

Kill them?

Yes...

It was the logical conclusion of the situation.

Which alternative was there again.

Let them go?

They had just watched Percvale’s force destroy their barracks, kill their knights, capture their king, and burn their farmland. Letting them walk away meant letting them go tell that story to whoever would listen, which would include every neighboring territory.

It meant giving them the chance to organize a response before Darion had gotten Aldric home and the oath administered. It meant the advantage he had just paid seven lives to gain evaporating within a week.

Take them to Percvale?

He was already transporting a king. Adding Aldric’s entire council and his senior military commander to that cargo turned a complicated situation into an unmanageable one. More mouths to guard, more variables to control, more chances for something to go wrong on the road.

He had just overseen the deaths of thousands of Valdenmoor’s knights in the space of one morning. Bravar and the council advisors were two grains of sand in an ocean.

The wolf moved immediately. Executing the order.

It crossed the distance between Darion and the prisoners in two strides and hit the first council advisor with the full weight of Strength 55 behind it.

The man went down and the wolf was already moving to the next one. The screaming started immediately, a high, formless screaming.

Bravar had been standing straight the whole time. Hands bound, jaw set, dignity of a soldier who had decided how he was going to face what was coming. He was going to face it with braveness.

He had been brave through everything...

When the wolf started with his legs, Bravar shouted.

The sound he made was not brave. It was just sound, involuntary response of a body in serious pain before the rest of it followed, and then it stopped.

The wolf worked through all of them fast and complete and without drama on its end, even if there was considerable drama on the other end of the process.

When it was done, Darion looked at what remained for a moment, and then looked away.

He pulled every undead back into inventory. Knights, wolves, the Rops. The compound went from populated to empty in the time it took the green light to come and g, and then there was just the ruined barracks and the dead and the smoke still rising from the farmland in the distance and Darion standing in the middle of it with his living force assembled around him.

His knights were on horses now. All of them, horses they had taken from Valdenmoor’s stables: well-fed animals, proper stallions, the kind of horseflesh that a functioning kingdom maintained and Percvale had not been able to afford.

Seren was mounted too, the bow put away, her pack across her back. The bags across the saddlebags were full with coins, gold and silver both, everything his knights had moved from Aldric’s treasury and from the administrative building and from wherever else they had found reserves during the engagement.

Full bags on healthy horses.

Garren was already on the road to Percvale with Aldric. They needed to catch up. 𝓯𝓻𝓮𝙚𝙬𝓮𝙗𝒏𝙤𝒗𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝒐𝓶

"Move," Darion said.

They moved.

The horses ran.

He had never been on a horse this well-fed and this fast, the difference between Percvale’s surviving animals and what Valdenmoor’s stables had been maintaining was immediate and significant.